Foreseen (The Rothston Series) Page 3

Kinzie’s eyes narrowed, probably because I was babbling like an idiot. She took a deep breath, and her eyes wandered back to the maze. “Look, I’m not sure. I really was planning on asking if …” she started, but spun toward the table at the sight of the rat happily munching on a green pellet at the end of the maze. “Shoot!” Kinzie’s hand shot out to slam off the timer. “When did he finish the maze? I missed it!”

  “Oh … sorry. Let me grab him and you can run it again.”

  “No, that won’t work. We’re supposed to be seeing if it learns the maze on repeated runs, so I needed to time that one.” Her eyes sorted through the maze and her scowl deepened. “And that was too fast. He shouldn’t be done yet.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked as I retrieved the rat and handed him to her.

  She petted it absent-mindedly and bit her lip as she thought. After a moment of silence, she spoke. “I designed the maze with lots of wrong turns so the first run should have been slow. He couldn’t be finished unless …”

  “Unless he made the correct choice each time?” I offered and heard the conversation behind me die. Sasha must have decided to join the experiment she was supposed to be part of.

  “That can’t be,” Kinzie puzzled again.

  “What can’t be?” Sasha chirped, as Brolie moved over behind Kinzie to observe.

  I glanced at the intersections of the maze. The chance of getting each one right the first try would one out of … a lot. I pulled out my phone to do the math. “One hundred forty-seven thousand, four hundred fifty-six to one against that happening,” I told Kinzie. “You ought to play the lottery.”

  “Mmm,” she muttered, still stroking the rat while Sasha started bouncing up and down on her toes.

  “Oh my god! That’s so cool!” Sasha squealed. “Try it again! Try it again!”

  Kinzie scowled at her roommate. “There isn’t any point, Sasha. The experiment is screwed up. The rat can’t learn to do it better than that.”

  “Aw. Come on,” Sasha pouted. “I want to see if it will do it again. Maybe we have, like, a super genius rat.”

  “Go ahead, Kinzie. Give it a try,” Brolie prompted behind her. Kinzie jumped, perhaps not knowing he was there, but recovered quickly.

  “Rex, you’re the TA in this class. You know the experiment is ruined,” Kinzie told him. “I need to start over. New maze. New rat. Maybe both.”

  “Yeah, but I want to see it anyway. And since I’m the TA, you have to do what I say, right?” He leered at her in a weird sort of way, and Kinzie seemed to slump in acquiescence. Sasha had said that these two were dating, but that didn’t seem right to me. The looks they gave each other didn’t fit, aside from Brolie being a senior and Kinzie a freshman. Plus, he was a study in prep school douchery, and it didn’t go with Kinzie’s army pants and t-shirt. But then again, they say opposites attract.

  “Sure. I’ll do it again,” she agreed, but then shot me a glance from the corner of her eye. “Want to tell them the odds?”

  “Of it happening twice in a row? Small,” I answered, tapping numbers into my phone’s calculator. “Over twenty-one billion to one.”

  Kinzie laughed at that and the smile stayed on her face. I got the feeling I’d just taken the pressure off her to make the rat perform for everyone’s amusement – she knew it wouldn’t happen. She rubbed her forehead with her fingers as she held the rat out to me. “Want to do the honors again?”

  “Sure. We want the same conditions, right?” I pulled the rat up by the base of the tail, studying him as he struggled in the air. “You know, maybe this one is related to Speedy Gonzales and sprinted through the maze when we weren’t looking. If you use a different rat, it’ll be its first run and you can use that for your lab data,” I pointed out.

  “Speedy Gonzales was a mouse,” Kinzie corrected me, but she was looking around for a spare rat. The two guys at the next table hadn’t finished assembling their maze. “Would it be okay if we borrowed theirs?” she asked Brolie. He shrugged and switched the rats without explanation.

  “You ready?” he asked Kinzie, who picked up the timer.

  “Let Greg put her in. So everything else is the same.”

  I took my position beside Kinzie, lowering the new rat into the maze in the same spot as Kinzie called out, “Ready. Set. Now!” But this rat barely moved at all. She just sat down, poking her nose around at the corner of the dividers around her. The four of us watched for moment, as if we thought the rat might actually do the near impossible. But, not surprisingly, she didn’t.

  “There.” Kinzie sounded satisfied as she turned around to address her roommate. “Nothing. The first one was a fluke.”

  “Oh well,” Sasha conceded, but I caught her eyes flickering up to Brolie.

  “There was no way it was going to happen twice,” Kinzie confirmed.

  “I know, right?” Sasha laughed, as Brolie stood staring at the maze, not saying a word. “But you can’t blame me for wanting to see it, can you?”

  “I suppose not. But I didn’t see it the first time, either. Greg was distracting me, I guess.”

  “He can be very distracting,” Sasha cooed, wrapping herself around my arm as she kept talking, making plans for the weekend, it sounded like.

  I watched the rat to avoid listening. It was moving now, heading through the first intersection. She got it right and headed for the next one where she paused for a moment and went straight through that one – again, the correct choice. Of course, those weren’t choices at all, but following along a straight path. The next intersection presented the first real test. The rat needed to turn left. I found myself holding my breath as she bobbed up and down a few times before deciding – and took the correct path. I looked up, ready to cheer her on, when I saw that Brolie wasn’t exactly watching. He looked like he was lost in a daydream, staring blindly into the maze. Actually, he looked stoned. That didn’t seem to fit with Kinzie either. I went back to the rat, who guessed right on the next two turns as well, and stepped back at the nearly impossible feat.

  “… and I was thinking maybe we could all go to the movies tonight or …” Sasha was babbling, but then stopped midsentence. “What’s wrong, Greg?”

  I gave a short laugh. “She did it,” I gasped as the rat reached the goal. “Our little friend, Ratella, made all the correct turns.”

  “This is giving me a headache,” Kinzie said, stepping up to the maze and rubbing her head again. “It isn’t funny, Sasha!” she snapped as the brunette began giggling, and clapping her hands in delight. “We’ve got to take all this apart – maybe wash the box or something – and start over. It’s not possible for that to have happened.” Kinzie’s frustration was mounting as her roommate continued to giggle.

  “Don’t worry about it, Kinzie,” Brolie assured her. “Just a fluke. I’ll give you an A on the lab anyway. Just write down something and turn it in.”

  Kinzie’s brown-black eyes flew open at that. “No! That isn’t right. I need to do the lab. But … but … this is all wrong. There must be some problem with the maze. Two rats – that’s not possible.” Her eyes darted around for support and landed on me. “Tell them, Greg. Tell them it’s impossible.”

  I almost hated to disagree with her, but I kept thinking back to what she’d said in philosophy and knew that this girl was smart enough to understand the real answer. “Impossible? No, it isn’t impossible. And I think you just proved that Einstein was wrong when he dismissed quantum mechanics. The random does happen.”

  Her eyes burned through me. “You aren’t helping,” she said in a steely tone, as Brolie pulled Sasha to the side. She was still bouncing up and down on her toes, like she’d won a prize.

  “It’s still the truth,” I told Kinzie with a grin.

  “What do you know about quantum mechanics?” she questioned.

  I smiled. “More than you. I’m a physics major. That’s why I want to do the philosophy project on the topic you raised.”

  “Philosophy? Why are you talking to me ab
out that now?”

  “Because this is the only chance I’ve had to ask you. Will you do it with me?”

  Kinzie shook her head in resignation. “Sure. Whatever. We can talk next week. Right now, I need to fix this,” she answered, still trying to figure out what was wrong with her maze. She waved her hand toward Brolie and Sasha who had their heads together, whispering like two old gossips. “And those two are no help.”

  Chapter 3

  Kinzie

  Sasha skipped back from the cafeteria’s condiment bar with her lunch. Given the expression on her face, I knew what she was about to say.

  “Kinzie! Oh my god! This is going to be so great!” she trilled, hopping into the seat across the table from me. We were in the back corner of the room, away from the throngs of students chattering away over their lunches.

  “That’s what – the third time you’ve said that? Are you going to tell me what’s so exciting?” I asked, also for the third time.

  She giggled like I’d said something silly. “You’ll find out,” she teased with an impish gleam in her eyes. This couldn’t be good.

  I picked at the limp lettuce of my salad while she spooned ketchup from a bowl onto her chicken patty – or what passed for a chicken patty. If I had to guess, whatever Sasha was up to had to do with a guy. I couldn’t think of anything else that would make her act this way. Maybe she’d fixed me up on another “date” like she had a couple weekends ago with Rex Brolie. What a fiasco. We’d gone into Newberry for ice cream after a movie, and Rex stared at me the whole time. And when we talked, we couldn’t find anything we had in common. I was pretty sure Rex had a thing for Sasha, and that’s why he kept coming around – I’d just been a poor substitute. Maybe I’d talk to Rebekah Devoie after class this week and see if she wanted to do something sometime. I needed out of my roommate’s shadow.

  Sasha’s ketchup spilled over onto the gray blob of mashed potatoes, like the carnage from a second-rate horror flick. “That’s a lot of ketchup,” I told her, looking at the mess on her plate.

  “I know, right? Caroline taught me this trick in high school,” she explained. “Hides the lack of flavor. She lived all over growing up and said they put ketchup on everything in Canada. You’ll love Caroline, Kinzie. She can be a bitch, and I don’t trust her around pretty much any guys, but ...” She shoveled a pile of the dripping, red mess into her mouth, continuing her story about someone I didn’t know from the boarding school she’d attended. That’s where she’d met Rex Brolie, as well, although they only would have been there together for a year or so.

  I stopped listening, wondering why Sasha acted like we were best friends when we had nothing in common, either. Yet she always planned places for us to go, or things we should do together. In fact, she’d get annoyed the few times a week when I wanted to do things by myself – even just going for a run.

  “I’ve got to get to philosophy,” I told her, taking a last swallow of milk.

  She swirled her fork around her mashed potatoes. “Okay. I’ll see you after class, or … I mean … I guess I won’t,” she chirped. I started to ask her where she’d be, but wasn’t sure I wanted to know. If I needed to make a break from Sasha, this was my chance.

  “Sure,” I said without asking, and walked away from the table.

  Outside the Creighton Hall cafeteria, I pulled my windbreaker around me against the damp autumn breeze, thinking about the class. Greg Langston wanted to work on the final project together. I couldn’t imagine working with him, but maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. He’d surprised me in the psych lab on Friday, calculating probabilities and claiming to have an interest in quantum mechanics. Not what I expected from a guy like him, but maybe I’d been too quick to judge.

  My phone buzzed in the pocket of my pants, as I followed the brick path onto the academic quad. Probably Sasha feeling the need to finish whatever story I hadn’t been listening to when I left. I slowed my pace to read it, and stared at the words on the little screen: See me after your 1:00. Need 2 talk. Uncle Mark.

  Dr. Collier wanted to talk to me? I stopped in my tracks. Was it about the lab? Oh god. He must have found out the data in my lab report was faked. Why had I let Rex talk me into that? What would Uncle Mark do? Would I flunk the class? Be brought up on judicial charges for cheating? Be expelled? The phone nearly dropped from my trembling hands. I tightened my grip as I read the message again. He said “Uncle Mark,” not “Dr. Collier.” Maybe this didn’t have anything to do with the psychology class. My heart thudded to a stop. Had something happened to my dad? No, that didn’t make sense. Uncle Mark wouldn’t wait until later if that’s what it was. This had to be something about school. But maybe it didn’t have anything to do with the lab. Maybe it was to talk about last week’s mid-terms. He was my faculty advisor, after all.

  My feet moved slowly along the path as my head kept spinning out scenarios. What were the chances of my professor wanting to see me on the class day following me lying on my lab report? Coincidence? I shivered, knowing I should reject that possibility, but I wanted it to be true. And what was it Greg Langston had said in the lab? The random does happen, and my real lab results had proved it. I shuddered again as the thoughts collided in my head.

  After pushing through the doors of Bishop Hall, I took a deep breath, steeling myself to walk through the array of students mingling in the marble foyer. I dove into it, making it to the other side in one breath and quickly ducking into Room 102. I took my usual seat in the first row, opened my notebook and tried to bury myself in my scrawled notes from our reading on Kant, but the words didn’t register. I’d faked my lab and I was busted. I’d be kicked out of college. And even if some other school would take me, what would happen with my scholarship? Without that, I couldn’t go anywhere. Maybe part-time community college. God, why had I listened to Rex? I didn’t cheat. I’d never cheated. But … I couldn’t say that anymore. What had I done?

  ψ

  I peered through the doorway of the office, wanting to size up how bad this was going to be before I walked in. My heart dropped to my stomach at the sight of a white lab rat who sat grooming herself in the cage on the edge of the Uncle Mark’s broad desk. This was about the lab. Why else would he have brought one of the rats here? He was going to confront me with it somehow. It didn’t make sense, but it had to be true. The rat, sitting innocently in her cage, had to be part of this.

  My heart sank further as I slunk through the doorway, spotting Rex Brolie in one of the chairs in front of the desk. Dr. Collier was standing at the window, gazing out over the quad. Maybe he was working to control his anger, or maybe just figuring out how to tell me that my college career at Hutchins was over. I cleared my throat to let him know I was here, and slid into the chair next to Rex.

  “Good, Kinzie,” my professor said, turning from the window. I couldn’t bring myself to look at him – to look at either of them. Instead, my eyes traveled along the dark shelves piled with books and papers, and the pattern of the Asian rug covering part of the floor. Perhaps this would be the last time I would see them.

  Uncle Mark continued, keeping his tone pleasant, as he sat down in the leather chair behind the desk. “I’ve been talking to Rex about your lab last Friday and …”

  “It’s okay, Uncle Mark,” I interrupted, bowing my head to study my hands in the lap. My mouth went dry, but my conscience screamed for me to admit it and get it over with. There was no use pretending like I didn’t know why I was there. I took a deep breath. “I lied on my lab report. I won’t try to hide it. The results didn’t come out the way they were supposed to, and Rex said he had to lock up the rats, and I didn’t know what to do because the results I had were useless, and I … Rex … He … I shouldn’t have. I’ve never cheated before. He said it would be okay, but … But …” My words became disjointed and fat tears threatened to spill out of my eyes. I wiped my sleeve across them.

  “It’s okay, Kinzie,” Dr. Collier said to try to calm me.

  “No. It’s
not,” I asserted. “I lied on my class work. I cheated. That isn’t okay.”

  “Kinzie,” he said sternly. “Look at me.” I raised my eyes and saw Dr. Collier’s hazel ones crinkle in a smile. “This isn’t about the lab report you turned in.”

  “It’s not?” My heart leapt, but then stuttered to a stop again. I’d just admitted what I’d done. And why else would I be here. Why would … “But Rex …” I stammered. “Why is he here?”

  “He told me about your real lab results, Kinzie,” Uncle Mark said in the same soothing tone he’d used after I’d skinned my knee when I was little. “We’ve been talking about them all morning.”

  “All morning?” I parroted back. “Why?”

  “Let me explain it to her,” Rex jumped in brusquely, straightening in the chair beside me. “It wasn’t a fluke. You made the rats make the correct turns to get through the maze. I was reading you, and …”

  “Huh? Reading what? I didn’t have …”

  My lean professor held up his hand, and my eyes turned toward him in confusion. “With all due respect, Rex, this should come from me.” His voice was calm and deliberate. “Kinzie, you need to listen to me for a minute. Let’s talk about concepts. Imagine the world isn’t the way you think it is. Imagine all possible futures exist, like a tree spreading out its branches at points where decisions or actions send an object or a person in different directions.”

  All possible futures? I narrowed my eyes, blurring Uncle Mark’s tawny head as I tried to figure out where this could be going. Was this some lesson on how the rats made choices? Or was it about randomness or seeming impossibilities? Or was there something I’d missed in the reading for class? The only thing it sounded like was “… collapsing quantum wave functions,” I mumbled, remembering the concept from high school physics. Actually, we hadn’t studied that. My teacher had mentioned quantum physics a few times and I’d delved into it on my own because I liked the ideas. But that’s all they were – ideas. And they had nothing to do with psychology.